Dealing With Open Wi-Fi and Public Hotspots

The topic of open Wi-Fi and public hotspots has been in the news again, for several reasons. Last month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation launched OpenWireless.org, a project to create router firmware that would provide open wireless access to anyone in range of the user’s router.

Notionally, in addition to providing Internet access to everyone who needs it, it would make everyone’s Internet more private by removing the connection between one’s identity and IP address, since anyone could be using the open Wi-Fi to gain access. This would make surveillance and tracking based on the IP address unreliable.

Well-intentioned as this may be, people actually running this is not a good idea. Let’s assume that this can be done in such a way that your private network traffic is segregated from the open Wi-Fi traffic. Your own network traffic would not be at risk of exposure, but that’s not the only risk.

What goes out on your Internet connection ISP is your responsibility. You’re likely to end up in legal hot water if illegal behavior is carried out via your IP address. The potential for abuse is extremely high. High bandwidth usage by “guests” can also eat up your data cap, resulting in either a throttled connection or a large bandwidth bill at the end of the month.

Similar initiatives have been tried in other countries by projects like RedLibre and Guifi (both in Spain). However, the adoption of these has been rather limited. The implementation of these projects may have differed, but ultimately the risks are enough to deter users from participating in them, no matter how well-intentioned.

The other story that’s put public Wi-Fi in the news was Comcast Internet turning the modems of 50,000 subscribers into residential Wi-Fi hotspots. This hotspot would be separate from any Wi-Fi network the user established, and would be for the use of all Comcast subscribers. Before someone could log into this public hotspot, they would have to enter their Comcast username and password.

Other ISPs are bound to come up with similar public Wi-Fi hotspots. Two questions come to mind here. If I am a subscriber, should I opt out my network of this? Is it safe to log onto these public hotspots? Let’s deal with the first one.

In theory, the risks to users are far less in this scenario than with a purely open Wi-Fi scenario. Any data consumed by this access point does not count against the user’s data cap. Abuse of the hotspot is something that would be the responsibility of the ISP, not you. So, there’s no risk, right?

Not exactly. From a technical perspective, the biggest problem would be the separation of the hotspot’s traffic from your own. Unfortunately, wireless routers don’t have a good track record when it comes to software vulnerabilities. The existence of a vulnerability that exposes your network can’t be ruled out.

The real risk for is for people who want to use these hotspots. The above risk of vulnerable firmware applies to would-be users, too: it’s entirely possible that the network traffic of guests could be exposed to an attacker running a malicious version of the router firmware. It’s an inherent risk of connecting to a network that you may not completely trust.

Another risk is it enables other attacks that put your ISP credentials at risk. As some tech sites have noted, it is very easy to set up a fake hotspot with the same Service Set Identifier (SSID) as that used by the public hotspots offered by ISPs. Since these public hotspots use a captive portal to ask for your ISP’s credentials (to validate that you are a customer), an attacker can create a fake version of that portal to steal the ISP login credentials.

Until a better technical situation for open Wi-Fi becomes available, users will have to be careful in dealing with situations like this. An earlier blog post of ours also discussed using open Wi-Fi safely, with the use of virtual private networks (VPNs) being the most important tip there. Meanwhile, running one of these open wireless networks, given all the possible risks, is not a very good idea.

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